Jim Collins, executive vice president, DuPont, tours the new OLED materials scale-up facility at Stine-Haskell with Avi Avula, global business director, DuPont Displays.
DuPont Displays has opened a manufacturing facility designed in Newark that deliver production scale quantities of advanced materials for Organic Light Emitting Diode (OLED) displays for use in TVs and other displays.
The materials are designed to help manufacturers develop OLED displays that are brighter, more vivid, longer lasting and less expensive than the OLED TVs currently on the market. The facility is located at the DuPont Stine-Haskell Research Center.
DuPont’s facility is sized to meet the future growth expectations of the OLED TV industry, which analysts predict will increase by over 70 percent for the next several years and will require large quantities of sophisticated materials.
The materials are part of a long-running research effort that has been going on for the last 15 years at DuPont.
According to a release, the materials “are highly regarded for both solution and evaporative applications due to their long lifetime and deep color.”
In addition to a recently announced collaboration with an inkjet equipment maker to advance solution printed displays, DuPont is working with OLED display manufacturers to bring solution printed OLED technology to market as quickly as possible
DuPont’s new OLED facility at Stine-Haskell has large-scale formulation systems and can support simultaneous production of multiple product lines, the company reported
The project was partially funded by a grant from the state of Delaware in 2012, with DuPont investing more than $20 million.
The technology has been touted by DuPont as part of its focus on fast-growing markets as it sheds legacy holdings like the Performance Chemicals business and vehicle finishes. The chemical business is now known as Chemours, a publicly traded company.
The finishes business was sold to a private equity investor that renamed the company Axalta. The company later had a public offering of stock and recently announced plans for a new research center in the Philadelphia Navy Yard that will replace operations in Delaware.
This is actually a big deal – right now 80% of the world’s capacity for OLED display manufacturing is held by Samsung. This is a big reason why Apple never adopted the technology. B/c OLED’s don’t require backlighting (unlike LCD’s and LEDs), they are thinner, flexible, and more energy efficient. Not to mention higher contrast ratios, and many, many variations on form factor. Kudos to DD for staying on top of this.